TECHNICAL SESSIONS
Please note: There has been a schedule change. The keynote address will now take place at 9:00 a.m. on Thursday. The refereed papers and invited talks tracks will now begin at 9:00 a.m. on Wednesday. Please see below for the revised schedule.
Conference papers are available to conference registrants immediately and to everyone beginning June 25, 2008. Everyone can view the proceedings front matter immediately.
The videos of the invited talks, powered by Linux Pro Magazine, are now available.
Each of the videos is linked from their individual talks below. You can also view them all
here.
Proceedings Front Matter: Title Page | Conference Organizers and External Reviewers | Table of Contents | Index of Authors | Message from the Program Co-Chairs
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Tech Sessions:
Wednesday, June 25 |
Thursday, June 26 |
Friday, June 27 | Invited Talk Speakers
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Wednesday, June 25 |
9:00 a.m.–10:30 a.m. |
Wednesday |
REFEREED PAPERS
Constitution A
Introductory Remarks by Program Co-Chairs and Best Paper Awards
 
Virtualization
Session Chair: Xiaolan (Catherine) Zhang, IBM T.J. Watson Research Center
Awarded Best Paper!
Decoupling Dynamic Program Analysis from Execution in Virtual Environments
Jim Chow,
Tal Garfinkel, and
Peter M. Chen, VMware
Paper in HTML |
PDF
Listen in MP3 format
Protection Strategies for Direct Access to Virtualized I/O Devices
Paul Willmann,
Scott Rixner, and
Alan L. Cox, Rice University
Paper in HTML |
PDF
Listen in MP3 format
Bridging the Gap between Software and Hardware Techniques for I/O Virtualization
Jose Renato Santos,
Yoshio Turner,
and G. (John) Janakiraman, HP Labs;
Ian Pratt, University of Cambridge
Paper in HTML |
PDF
Listen in MP3 format
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INVITED TALKS
Grand Ballroom
Free and Open Source as Viewed by a Processor Developer
Peter Kronowitt, Intel
View the video
Listen in MP3 format
View the presentation slides
Intel designs, builds, and markets microprocessors. We are often viewed as being downstream of the work done by the closed source programming community. In fact, however, long before the term "free and open source" was coined, Intel was working to develop, release, and support software for many of the devices we and other firms design and manufacture. This talk highlights how Intel successfully utilized open source to support industry progress while fulfilling our own strategic corporate objectives.
Our experiences with being "good citizens" were not easy and did not "just happen." We hope that others can learn from both our successes and our failures and take these ideas back to their own firms. I will highlight areas where we at Intel learned from our missteps, ultimately improving our community standing.
The talk does not just look back: some of our open source projects initiated in the past twelve months will be examined, as we believe many in the audience will find them interesting and, we hope, will consider helping improve them.
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THE GURU IS IN
Constitution B
Automated System Management
Æleen Frisch,
Exponential Consulting
This session discusses tools for automating system management and monitoring. We can discuss Cfengine, Amanda, Bacula, SNMP+Nagios, and RRDTool+Front ends. Note that we will focus on general approaches and techniques rather than the most obscure nooks and crannies of any specific tool.
Æleen Frisch has been working as a system administrator for over 20 years. She currently looks after a pathologically heterogeneous network of UNIX and Windows systems. She is the author of several books, including Essential System Administration (now in its 3rd edition). Æleen was the program committee chair for LISA '03 and is a frequent presenter at USENIX and SAGE events, as well as presenting classes for universities and corporations worldwide.
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10:30 a.m.–11:00 a.m. Break |
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11:00 a.m.–12:30 p.m. |
Wednesday |
REFEREED PAPERS
Constitution A
Disk Storage
Session Chair: Sean Rhea, Meraki, Inc.
Idle Read After Write—IRAW
Alma Riska and
Erik Riedel, Seagate Research
Paper in HTML |
PDF
Listen in MP3 format
Design Tradeoffs for SSD Performance
Nitin Agrawal, University of Wisconsin—Madison;
Vijayan Prabhakaran,
Ted Wobber,
John D. Davis,
Mark Manasse, and
Rina Panigrahy, Microsoft Research, Silicon Valley
Paper in HTML |
PDF
Listen in MP3 format
Context-Aware Mechanisms for Reducing Interactive Delays of Energy Management in Disks
Igor Crk and
Chris Gniady, University of Arizona
Paper in HTML |
PDF
Listen in MP3 format
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INVITED TALKS
Grand Ballroom
From Flapping Birds to Space Telescopes: The Modern Science of Origami
Robert J. Lang, Artist and Consultant
View the video
Listen in MP3 format
View the presentation slides
The last decade of this past century has been witness to a revolution in the development and application of mathematical techniques to origami, the centuries-old Japanese art of paper-folding. The techniques used in mathematical origami design range from the abstruse to the highly approachable. In this talk I will describe how geometric concepts led to the solution of a broad class of origami folding problems—specifically, the problem of efficiently folding a shape with an arbitrary number and arrangement of flaps—and enabled origami designs of mind-blowing complexity and realism, some of which you'll see, too. As often happens in mathematics, theory developed for its own sake has led to some surprising practical applications. The algorithms and theorems of origami design have shed light on long-standing mathematical questions and have solved practical engineering problems. I will discuss how origami has enabled safer airbags, Brobdingnagian space telescopes, and more.
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THE GURU IS IN
Constitution B
High Performance Virtualization Architectures
Richard McDougall, VMware
This guru session is about the operating system, hypervisor, and hardware architecture foundations for high-performance virtualization. We will explore virtualization, paravirtualization, and hardware virtualization assist technologies; their impact on operating system primitives; and the resulting application performance. We'll also talk about performance instrumentation strategies for virtualization. Bring your questions along; this is aimed at being an interactive session.
Richard McDougall is a Principal Engineer and the Chief Performance Architect in the Office of the CTO at VMware. A recognized expert in operating systems, virtualization, performance, resource management, and filesystem technologies, Richard is a frequent speaker and has published several papers and books on these topics. Prior to VMware, most recently he was a Distinguished Engineer at Sun Microsystems, where he wrote the authoritative books Solaris Internals and Solaris Performance and Tools.
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12:30 p.m.–2:00 p.m. Lunch (on your own) |
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2:00 p.m.–3:30 p.m. |
Wednesday |
REFEREED PAPERS
Constitution A & B
Network
Session Chair: Jeff Mogul, HP Labs
Optimizing TCP Receive Performance
Aravind Menon and
Willy Zwaenepoel, EPFL
Paper in HTML |
PDF
Listen in MP3 format
ConfiDNS: Leveraging Scale and History to Detect Compromise
Lindsey Poole and
Vivek S. Pai, Princeton University
Paper in
PDF
Listen in MP3 format
Large-scale Virtualization in the Emulab Network Testbed
Mike Hibler,
Robert Ricci,
Leigh Stoller, and
Jonathon Duerig, University of Utah;
Shashi Guruprasad, Cisco Systems; Tim Stack, VMware;
Kirk Webb, Morgan Stanley;
Jay Lepreau, University of Utah
Paper in HTML |
PDF
Listen in MP3 format
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INVITED TALKS
Grand Ballroom
Millicomputing: The Future in Your Pocket and Your Datacenter
Adrian Cockcroft, Netflix, Inc., and Homebrew Mobile Club
View the video
Listen in MP3 format
View the presentation slides
The fastest-moving part of the computer industry is now the compute power and storage capacity of the computers we carry in our pockets. The software we carry in our pockets is also migrating to a full-featured, flexible, and openly programmable operating system. This talk discusses the multicore graphical supercomputer for 2010, which won't burn your leg if you put it in your pocket, and the implications of these changes for both the personal computing space and the enterprise computing/green datacenter space. A millicomputer doesn't need heat-sinks or fans.
The kind of power and storage provided by iPhone-class systems will increase by a factor of four to eight times over the next two years. The component maker roadmaps also show the addition of high-performance 3D graphics, video stream processors, and several GFLOPS of floating-point number crunching within the same 250 milliwatt power budget as today's millicomputer CPUs.
The power envelope of Intel's 64-bit PC-class CPUs is on a collision course with mobile devices over the next few years. Intel is working down into this space to compete with the ARM-based CPUs which currently dominate battery-powered pocket devices.
Each new wave of computing has liberated its users and become more pervasive. In recent history the desktop PC and phone tied to a wired network have been replaced by the wireless laptop and mobile phone. In the next wave, the boundaries between laptop and phone will blur. They will be capable of running the same operating systems and applications and will talk to the same networks. Everyone will be online all the time. How will our lifestyle change? What are the new applications? What is ambient presence?
Datacenter power consumption is a hot topic. By leveraging CPU designs from the world of battery-powered devices and flash-memory-based storage, we can make very cool systems. A single millicomputer draws less than one watt, and enterprise millicomputer arrays provide large numbers of small computing units at a total cost, performance, and power consumption that redefine the limits of what is possible. These systems are being specified as open source hardware by their end users. This talk covers the roadmap of architecture and performance characteristics of millicomputers over the next two years.
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THE GURU IS IN
Back Bay A
Playing Fast and Loose with the Sysadmin Space-Time Continuum
David N. Blank-Edelman, Northeastern University CCIS
Sometimes in the sysadmin world you get handed challenges that can't be dealt with using your standard approaches. Maybe the problem is too hard, complex, or off-the-wall to deal with in the usual manner. These situations call for an extra helping of creativity. Let's talk about how out-of-the-box thinking, creative and wacky solutions, and general mucking about with the rules can or have been applied to your sticky wickets. Bring your best problems and strangest solutions to share.
David N. Blank-Edelman is the Director of Technology at the Northeastern University College of Computer and Information Science and the author of the O'Reilly book Perl for System Administration. He has spent the past 20+ years as a system/network administrator in large multi-platform environments, including Brandeis University, Cambridge Technology Group, and the MIT Media Laboratory. He was the program chair of LISA '05 and was one of the LISA '06 Invited Talks co-chairs. He delights in finding how creativity can further the field as demonstrated in his off-the-beaten-path invited talks and tutorials at USENIX conferences.
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3:30 p.m.–4:00 p.m. Break |
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4:00 p.m.–5:30 p.m. |
Wednesday |
REFEREED PAPERS
Constitution A & B
File and Storage Systems
Session Chair: Jason Flinn, University of Michigan
FlexVol: Flexible, Efficient File Volume Virtualization in WAFL
John K. Edwards,
Daniel Ellard,
Craig Everhart,
Robert Fair,
Eric Hamilton,
Andy Kahn,
Arkady Kanevsky,
James Lentini,
Ashish Prakash,
Keith A. Smith, and
Edward Zayas, NetApp, Inc.
Paper in HTML |
PDF
Listen in MP3 format
Fast, Inexpensive Content-Addressed Storage in Foundation
Sean Rhea, Meraki, Inc.;
Russ Cox and
Alex Pesterev, MIT CSAIL
Paper in HTML |
PDF
Listen in MP3 format
Adaptive File Transfers for Diverse Environments
Himabindu Pucha, Carnegie Mellon University;
Michael Kaminsky, Intel Research Pittsburgh;
David G. Andersen, Carnegie Mellon University;
Michael A. Kozuch, Intel Research Pittsburgh
Paper in HTML |
PDF
Listen in MP3 format
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INVITED TALKS
Grand Ballroom
Programming DNA: A 2-bit Language for Engineering Biology
Drew Endy, Cabot Assistant Professor of Biological Engineering at MIT and a co-founder of the BioBricks Foundation (BBF)
View the video
Listen in MP3 format
Biological engineering does not have to be confined to high-end industry laboratories. A more open culture of biological technology should be fostered. This talk is an effort in that direction: it aims to equip you with basic practical knowledge of biological engineering.
Genetic engineering is now a thirty-year-old technology. For reference, it was over a similar period of time that modern computing machines went from exclusive objects used to design weapons of mass destruction to the now ubiquitous panoply of personal computing devices that support mass communication and construction. Inspired by this and many other examples of overwhelmingly constructive uses of technology by individuals, we have been working over the past five years to develop new tools that will help to make biology easy to engineer. We have also been working to foster a constructive culture of future biological technologists who can reliably and responsibly conceive, develop, and deliver biological technologies that solve local problems.
This talk will introduce current best practice in biological engineering, including an overview of how to order synthetic DNA and how to use and contribute standard biological parts to an open source collection of genetic functions. The talk will also discuss issues of human practice, including biological safety; biological security; ownership, sharing, and innovation in biotechnology; community organization; and perception across many different publics. My hope is that the conference attendees will help me to understand how best to enable an overwhelmingly constructive hacker culture for programming DNA.
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THE GURU IS IN
Back Bay A
Managing Large (to Massive) Storage Systems
Jacob Farmer, Cambridge Computer Services
Jacob Farmer is a well-known figure in the data storage industry. He has written numerous papers and articles and is a regular speaker at trade shows and conferences. In addition to his regular expert advice column in the "Reader I/O" section of InfoStor Magazine, the leading trade magazine of the data storage industry, Jacob also serves as the publication's senior technical advisor. Jacob has over 18 years of experience with storage technologies and is the CTO of Cambridge Computer Services, a national integrator of data storage and data protection solutions.
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6:00 p.m.–7:30 p.m. |
Wednesday |
Poster Session & Happy Hour
Back Bay A/B/C
Session Chairs: Emre Kıcıman, Microsoft Research;
Sam King, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Don't miss the cool new ideas and the latest preliminary research on display at the Poster Session & Happy Hour. Take part in discussions with your colleagues over complimentary drinks and snacks. Check out the list of accepted posters.
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Tech Sessions:
Wednesday, June 25 |
Thursday, June 26 |
Friday, June 27 | Invited Talk Speakers
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Thursday, June 26 |
9:00 a.m.–10:30 a.m. |
Thursday |
Grand Ballroom
Awards Presentation: USENIX Lifetime Achievement Award and Software Tools User Group (STUG) Award
Keynote Address
The Parallel Revolution Has Started: Are You Part of the Solution or Part of
the Problem?
David Patterson, Director, U.C. Berkeley Parallel Computing Laboratory
View the video
Listen in MP3 format
View the presentation slides
This talk will explain:
- Why the La-Z-Boy era of programming is over
- Why the parallel revolution cannot be halted by a no-confidence vote from the USENIX community
- The implications for the IT industry if the revolution should fail
- The opportunities and pitfalls of this revolution
- What Berkeley is doing to be at the forefront of this revolution
Power to the (manycore) processors!
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10:30 a.m.–11:00 a.m. Break |
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11:00 a.m.–12:30 p.m. |
Thursday |
REFEREED PAPERS
Constitution A & B
Web and Internet Services
Session Chair: John Wilkes, HP Labs
Handling Flash Crowds from Your Garage
Jeremy Elson and
Jon Howell, Microsoft Research
Paper in HTML |
PDF
Listen in MP3 format
Remote Profiling of Resource Constraints of Web Servers Using Mini-Flash Crowds
Pratap Ramamurthy, University of WisconsinMadison;
Vyas Sekar, Carnegie Mellon University;
Aditya Akella, University of WisconsinMadison;
Balachander Krishnamurthy, AT&T LabsResearch;
Anees Shaikh, IBM Research
Paper in HTML |
PDF
Listen in MP3 format
A Dollar from 15 Cents: Cross-Platform Management for Internet Services
Christopher Stewart, University of Rochester;
Terence Kelly and
Alex Zhang, Hewlett-Packard Labs;
Kai Shen, University of Rochester
Paper in HTML |
PDF
Listen in MP3 format
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INVITED TALKS
Grand Ballroom
Xen and the Art of Virtualization Revisited
Ian Pratt, Senior Lecturer, University of Cambridge Computer Laboratory, and Fellow, King's College Cambridge
View the video
Listen in MP3 format
View the presentation slides
This is a talk in three parts. I'll give a summary of the Xen story so
far, looking at how Xen made the transition from research project to
enterprise software and the many challenges along the way. Next, I'll
look at why virtualization is such a hot topic in IT and the failings
of common operating systems that have led to this. I'll then look at
how Xen has evolved since the 2004 SOSP paper, seeing how
paravirtualization and software/hardware co-design have helped reduce
the overhead of virtualization.
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THE GURU IS IN
Back Bay A
Wireless Security, Setup, Troubleshooting, and the Future
Rudi van Drunen, Competa IT
Wireless is not limited to the WiFi at your favorite coffee-hangout or the 802.11b standard. New techniques, protocols, and technologies are emerging or are ready to be deployed. By attending this guru session you can get answers to most of your questions, whether it be what kind of antenna to use, how to deploy a campus/ community wireless network securely (for the enterprise and beyond), what kind of hardware to use, or why your clients keep failing to connect to the service or how solve the authentication question.
Rudi van Drunen is one of the co-founders of wireless Leiden, one of the leading Wireless community networks in The Netherlands. He works as a UNIX consultant/architect and CTO at a consulting company, focussing on large infrastructures. He has given talks and taught at (amongst others) various USENIX events and SANE conferences.
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12:30 p.m.–2:00 p.m. Lunch (on your own) |
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2:00 p.m.–3:30 p.m. |
Thursday |
REFEREED PAPERS
Constitution A & B
Workloads and Benchmarks
Session Chair: Emre Kıcıman, Microsoft Research
Measurement and Analysis of Large-Scale Network File System Workloads
Andrew W. Leung, University of California, Santa Cruz;
Shankar Pasupathy and
Garth Goodson, NetApp Inc.;
Ethan L. Miller, University of California, Santa Cruz
Paper in HTML |
PDF
Listen in MP3 format
Evaluating Distributed Systems: Does Background Traffic Matter?
Kashi Venkatesh Vishwanath and
Amin Vahdat, University of California, San Diego
Paper in HTML |
PDF
Listen in MP3 format
Cutting Corners: Workbench Automation for Server Benchmarking
Piyush Shivam, Sun Microsystems;
Varun Marupadi,
Jeff Chase, Thileepan Subramaniam, and
Shivnath Babu, Duke University
Paper in HTML |
PDF
Listen in MP3 format
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INVITED TALKS
Grand Ballroom
A Report on the Project Darkstar Anthropological Expedition Into the World of Massively Scaled Online Games
Jim Waldo, Sun Microsystems Labs
View the video
Listen in MP3 format
View the presentation slides
While the culture of enterprise computing, transaction processing, and Web services has developed, an entirely different culture centering on computing has been evolving in a different ecosystem. Although those in our culture tend to play with the artifacts produced by their culture and those in their culture tend to use the programming languages produced in our culture, in fact the two groups lost contact somewhere in the Colossal Cave and have had little real interaction since.
These cultures are about to be brought together again. The architectural move to multicore, multithreaded chips will require changes in the way games are programmed, while the requirements of scaling in games such as World of Warcraft require the use of distributed systems. As virtual worlds emerge, the distinction between business or scientific systems and games will start to disappear.
During the past two years, I have led a project at Sun Microsystems Laboratories to build a highly scalable, highly concurrent infrastructure for massive-scale online games and virtual worlds. This work has brought us into contact with the culture of games and the inhabitants of that culture. In this talk I will describe some of the ways in which the game world differs from the computing world most of us are used to, and I'll discuss the challenges facing that world that might profitably be approached in a cross-cultural fashion.
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THE GURU IS IN
Back Bay A
Consulting
Adam Moskowitz, Permabit Technology Corporation
This session will focus mainly on the "nuts and bolts of consulting": record-keeping, rates and billing, tax rules, retirement plans, contracts, intellectual property, client management, etc. However, any question related to consulting will be entertained (and maybe even answered).
Adam started his career as a consultant in 1978; since then he has
switched between consulting and full-time employment as opportunities
and circumstances required. Adam's consulting experience includes
programming, system administration, technical training, and
infrastructure architecture. He currently works as a senior system
administrator at Permabit Technology Corporation, but only to support
his hobby of judging barbecue contests and to keep food in his puppy's
bowl.
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3:30 p.m.–4:00 p.m. Break |
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4:00 p.m.–5:30 p.m. |
Thursday |
REFEREED PAPERS
Constitution A & B
Short Papers
Session Chair: David Presotto, Google
Power-aware Remote Replication for Enterprise-level Disaster Recovery Systems
Kazuo Goda and
Masaru Kitsuregawa, The University of Tokyo
Paper in HTML |
PDF
Listen in MP3 format
A Linux Implementation Validation of Track-Aligned Extents and Track-Aligned RAIDs
Jin Qian,
Christopher Meyers, and
An-I Andy Wang, Florida State University
Paper in HTML |
PDF
Listen in MP3 format
Automatic Optimization of Parallel Dataflow Programs
Christopher Olston,
Benjamin Reed,
Adam Silberstein, and
Utkarsh Srivastava, Yahoo! Research
Paper in HTML |
PDF
Listen in MP3 format
A TCP-layer Name Service for TCP Ports
Sérgio Freire, PT Inovação/IEETA/University of Aveiro;
André Zúquete, IEETA/IT/University of Aveiro
Paper in HTML |
PDF
Listen in MP3 format
Using Causality to Diagnose Configuration Bugs
Mona Attariyan and
Jason Flinn, University of Michigan
Paper in HTML |
PDF
Listen in MP3 format
Diverse Replication for Single-Machine Byzantine-Fault Tolerance
Byung-Gon Chun, ICSI;
Petros Maniatis, Intel Research Berkeley;
Scott Shenker, University of California, Berkeley
Paper in HTML |
PDF
Listen in MP3 format
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INVITED TALKS
Grand Ballroom
Internet Surveillance: Building Our Own Trojan Horse
Susan Landau, Sun Microsystems
View the video
Listen in MP3 format
View the presentation slides
From its requirement that surveillance capabilities be built into VoIP communications systems to its expansion of warrantless wiretapping into any communications of which one end is "reasonably believed" to be located outside the United States, the U.S. federal government is slowly but steadily extending wiretapping capabilities onto the Internet. This effort is made in the name of national security, but building architected security breaches into a communications network carries real risks. In a world that includes al-Qaeda and Hurricane Katrina, does this increased wiretapping capability make us safer? We will examine what real security needs are in a post-9/11 world.
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THE GURU IS IN
Back Bay A
Interoperability Issues in Heterogeneous Networks
Gerald Carter,
Centeris/Samba Team
Network interoperability covers a broad variety of topics. Join this session with Gerald Carter to discuss topics such as Active Directory and Kerberos, Samba, and diagnosing communication problems between UNIX, Windows, and OS X hosts.
Gerald Carter has been a member of the Samba Development Team
since 1998. He has been developing, writing about, and
teaching on open source since the late 1990s. Currently
employed by Centeris as a Samba and open source developer,
Gerald has written books for SAMS Publishing and for
O'Reilly Publishing.
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6:00 p.m.–7:30 p.m. |
Thursday |
Conference Reception
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Tech Sessions:
Wednesday, June 25 |
Thursday, June 26 |
Friday, June 27 | Invited Talk Speakers
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Friday, June 27 |
9:00 a.m.–10:30 a.m. |
Friday |
REFEREED PAPERS
Constitution A & B
Security and Bugs
Session Chair: Yuanyuan Zhou, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Awarded Best Student Paper!
Vx32: Lightweight User-level Sandboxing on the x86
Bryan Ford and
Russ Cox, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Paper in HTML |
PDF
Listen in MP3 format
LeakSurvivor: Towards Safely Tolerating Memory Leaks for Garbage-Collected Languages
Yan Tang,
Qi Gao, and
Feng Qin, The Ohio State University
Paper in HTML |
PDF
Listen in MP3 format
Perspectives: Improving SSH-style Host Authentication with Multi-Path Probing
Dan Wendlandt,
David G. Andersen, and
Adrian Perrig, Carnegie Mellon University
Paper in HTML |
PDF
Listen in MP3 format
Spectator: Detection and Containment of JavaScript Worms
Benjamin Livshits and
Weidong Cui, Microsoft Research
Paper in HTML |
PDF
Listen in MP3 format
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INVITED TALKS
Grand Ballroom
Using Hadoop for Webscale Computing
Ajay Anand, Yahoo!
View the video
Listen in MP3 format
View the presentation slides
Apache Hadoop is an open source implementation of a distributed filesystem and map-reduce programming model combined into one package. Hadoop scales smoothly from tens to thousands of computers. The framework allows engineers to harness the power of these clusters very simply, taking advantage of three major features:
- A reliable, non-hardware-based distributed filesystem: Hadoop DFS runs on any number of nodes, taking advantage of their combined storage to manage replication and recovery from failure.
- A simple, functional programming model: Hadoop Map-Reduce is a parallelized implementation of a very simple programming methodology first popularized by the functional programming group in the 1970s.
- Infrastructure to aid in the automation of job execution: Hadoop automates bringing user code to the data, and it manages parallel execution and handles node failure.
The talk will provide an overview of Apache Hadoop, along with examples of how this infrastructure is being used at Yahoo! and other organizations today.
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THE GURU IS IN
Back Bay A
Parallel Programming Languages
Stephen C. Johnson, The MathWorks, Inc.
How will we program real applications in the new parallel world? By thinking about the effective use of, say, 32 processors, we can shed some toy solutions. A good place to start is to assess what has worked well historically and what has failed, at least as general techniques. I'll bring my lists and some additional ideas, and invite you to add to them and dispute them.
Steve Johnson is a former president of USENIX who has been involved
with C and UNIX since their earliest days. He is the author of Yacc,
lint, and the Portable C Compiler. He also spent 15 years in Silicon
Valley, most recently at Transmeta. He is currently employed at The
MathWorks, Natick, MA, where he works on the MATLAB language.
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10:30 a.m.–11:00 a.m. Break |
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11:00 a.m.–12:30 p.m. |
Friday |
REFEREED PAPERS
Constitution A & B
Memory and Buffer Management
Session Chair: Arkady Kanevsky, NetApp
A Compacting Real-Time Memory Management System
Silviu S. Craciunas,
Christoph M. Kirsch,
Hannes Payer,
Ana Sokolova,
Horst Stadler, and
Robert Staudinger, University of Salzburg
Paper in HTML |
PDF
Listen in MP3 format
Prefetching with Adaptive Cache Culling for Striped Disk Arrays
Sung Hoon Baek and
Kyu Ho Park, Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology
Paper in HTML |
PDF
Listen in MP3 format
Context-Aware Prefetching at the Storage Server
Gokul Soundararajan,
Madalin Mihailescu, and
Cristiana Amza, University of Toronto
Paper in HTML |
PDF
Listen in MP3 format
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INVITED TALKS
Grand Ballroom
Google Hacking: Making Competitive Intelligence Work for You
Tom Bowers
View the video
Listen in MP3 format
View the presentation slides
With more than 200 million searches a day, Google offers users a quick and easy solution to finding information with just a flick of a finger. Today, everything from online newspapers to public documents and search engines is being used to perform competitive intelligence analysis, and it's easier than ever. But how much information is truly available? Can it be used against you and your business? Is it possible to use simple, everyday tools like Google to gain—or forfeit—economic advantage over your competitors?
This presentation will examine Google hacking and how today's online search engines can double as competitive intelligence tools. Audience members will learn how, using basic Google tools, they can conduct competitive intelligence searches, analyze their information online, identify leaks, and minimize their business risk.
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THE GURU IS IN
Back Bay A
Java as a System Language
Jim Waldo, Sun Microsystems Labs
View the presentation slides
Even though it is getting a little long in the tooth, and being buffetted by "hipper" languages like Ruby, Python, and JavaScript, there is still good reason to pick Java as the implementation language for large systems. In this session, I'll defend the use of Java in such circumstances, point out what aspects of the language help and which hurt, and talk about some of the more recent additions that might be better avoided. And, of course, I'll take questions and enter into non-terminating debates with anyone who wishes.
Jim Waldo is a Distinguished Engineer with Sun Microsystems Laboratories, where he investigates next-generation large-scale distributed systems. He is currently the technical lead of Project Darkstar, a multi-threaded, distributed infrastructure for massive multi-player on-line games and virtual worlds. Prior to Project Darkstar, Jim was the technical lead for Neuromancer, an investigation into support for large-scale medical sensing deployments.
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12:30 p.m.–2:00 p.m. Lunch (on your own) |
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2:00 p.m.–3:30 p.m. |
Friday |
REFEREED PAPERS
Constitution A & B
Wide-Area Systems
Session Chair: Rebecca Isaacs, Microsoft Research
Free Factories: Unified Infrastructure for Data Intensive Web Services
Alexander Wait Zaranek,
Tom Clegg,
Ward Vandewege, and
George M. Church, Harvard University
Paper in HTML |
PDF
Listen in MP3 format
Wide-Scale Data Stream Management
Dionysios Logothetis and
Kenneth Yocum, University of California, San Diego
Paper in HTML |
PDF
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Experiences with Client-based Speculative Remote Display
John R. Lange and
Peter A. Dinda, Northwestern University;
Samuel Rossoff, University of Victoria
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INVITED TALKS
Grand Ballroom
Current and Next-Generation Digital Forensics
Golden G. Richard,
University of New Orleans
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Digital evidence exists on a wide variety of devices, from traditional
computers to PDAs, voice recorders, game consoles, and cell phones.
This talk provides an introduction to digital forensics, the art (and
science) of discovering and preserving digital evidence, from two
perspectives: digital investigation and research. The talk covers
basic concepts, best practices, common data-hiding techniques,
investigative challenges, and what is (and isn't) recoverable. Most
important, it examines the major limitations of current-generation
tools and discusses next-generation approaches that may help
investigators to deal with the ever-increasing size and complexity of
forensics targets. These approaches cover a wide spectrum, from
applying research in bioinformatics to the use of parallel and
distributed architectures, Graphics Processing Units (GPUs), advanced
file-carving techniques, and tools for live investigation.
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THE GURU IS IN
Back Bay A
MySQL
Sheeri Cabral, The Pythian Group
Sheeri Cabral is a MySQL DBA with lots of experience helping people with their database problems. She won MySQL's Community Advocate Award in 2006 and 2007 and has been a technical editor for O'Reilly's SQL Hacks and High Performance MySQL 2nd Edition. Bring your database questions (and queries) and Sheeri can help you understand MySQL better, optimize troublesome queries, and make your systems perform better!
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3:30 p.m.–4:00 p.m. Break |
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4:00 p.m.–5:30 p.m. |
Friday |
Plenary Closing Session
Grand Ballroom
The Columbia Accident Investigation and Returning NASA's Space Shuttle to Flight
Matthew Melis, NASA Glenn Research Center
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On February 1, 2003, the space shuttle Columbia broke apart during reentry, resulting in loss of the vehicle and its seven crew members. Over the next several months, an extensive investigation of the accident took place, involving a nationwide team of experts from NASA, industry, and academia that spanned dozens of technical disciplines. The Columbia Accident Investigation Board (CAIB), a group of experts assembled to conduct an investigation independent of NASA, concluded in August 2003 that the most likely cause of the loss of Columbia and its crew was a breach in the left wing leading-edge Reinforced Carbon-Carbon (RCC) thermal protection system. The breach was initiated by the impact of thermal insulating foam that had separated from the orbiter's external fuel tank 81 seconds into the mission's launch. During reentry, this breach allowed superheated air to penetrate behind the leading edge and erode the aluminum structure of the left wing, which ultimately led to the breakup of the orbiter. The findings of the CAIB were supported by ballistic impact tests, which simulated the physics of external tank foam impact on the RCC wing leading-edge material. These tests ranged from fundamental material characterization tests to full-scale orbiter wing leading edge tests.
Following the accident investigation, NASA spent the next 18 months focused on returning the shuttle safely to flight. In order to fully evaluate all potential impact threats from the many debris sources during ascent, NASA instituted a significant impact-testing program. The results from these tests led to the validation of high-fidelity computer models capable of predicting actual or potential shuttle impact events. These models were used in the certification of STS-114, NASA's Return to Flight Mission, as safe to fly.
Matthew Melis served for nearly five years as technical lead of the NASA Glenn Ballistic Impact Team for both the Columbia Accident Investigation and NASA's Return to Flight program. In a presentation rich with imagery and high-speed motion pictures, Mr. Melis will provide a look into the inner workings of the space shuttle and a behind-the-scenes perspective on the impact analysis and testing conducted to identify the cause of the Columbia accident and enhance safety for NASA's future shuttle missions. In addition, highlights from recent shuttle missions will be presented.
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